Some common sense about Sarah Palin’s hair
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The first Tea Party Convention is taking place in Nashville, TN. Last night Sarah Palin gave a speech and it was a bomb. Not the way her speeches are usually bombs- in that spectacularly stupid but folksy populist way that brought her to national attention in the first place.
No, just a bomb. Not funny; not biting; not even interesting.
An article on the Atlantic website called Palin’s speech a possible mistake for her and the movement. The convention has been criticized for being elitist, expensive, and for-profit and
Palin’s appearance has driven some of that criticism. She’s rumored to be getting $100,000 for her keynote.
We’re getting massive grassroots input that they’re unhappy with what she’s doing right now,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the group Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots coordinating group with state and local chapters, which seeks to communicate with smaller independent groups across the nation.
According to an op-ed that Palin wrote for USA Today, she went to the Tea Party because after thinking “long and hard” about it, she wanted to go not to financially benefit (she insists any fees will go right back to the “cause”), but because she shares the Tea Party’s
limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization; it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.”
That “common sense” word is one Palin uttered several times during her speech. The Tea Party is built upon it. Common sense is, as cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us decades ago, a way to make sure your point of view cannot be challenged because it’s “obvious” to all who are “sane.”
Knowing that rain wets and that one ought to come in out of it, or that fire burns and one ought not to play with it…are conflated into comprising one large realm of the given and undeniable, a catalog of in-the-grain-of-nature realities so peremptory as to force themselves upon any mind sufficiently unclouded to receive them. Yet this is clearly not so. No one, or no one functioning very well, doubts that rain wets; but there may be some people around who question the proposition that one ought to come in out of it, holding that it is good for one’s character to brave the elements—hatlessness is next to godliness. And the attractions of playing with fire often, with some people usually, override the full recognition of the pain that will result. Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.
Common sense is what passes as “obvious,” but in fact is obviously to the benefit of those who own it. The common sense of the Tea Party is that white, straight, rural Americans ought to be benefiting from the system. And Palin wants to exploit that common sense to break up the GOP elites up as well as attract many of the white, rural, straight Dems to her side. It was common sense that during the Q and A session, a chant rose up for President Palin.
Run, Palin, Run.”
Given her audience and her goals, I suppose it was also just good “common sense” for Palin to show up with that horrible hair? Palin’s hair is no longer a sexy, secretarial up-do, but a long, curled up at the ends, big, highly hair-sprayed poof .
Oh how I used to swoon at Palin’s ‘do. It made her look trendy and bookish and even smart. It made me want to grow my hair out and look just like her. It made me sometimes even listen to what she had to say.
But Palin’s appearance at the Tea Party extravaganza yesterday was undermined by her hair. Instead of her usual ability to make even the elites stop and listen to her nonsensical “common sense,” she spoke only to her base, the radical conservative white activists who make up the Tea Party movement.
And quite honestly the white, rural base is not really in charge in this country anymore.
Sarah, please listen to common sense. We know you want to be a hairetic and lead the way. But the Tea Party movement just isn’t big enough or important enough to be changing your hair for. The best way to get your brand of common sense to dominate is to get rid of that ridiculous, Tea Party- inspired hairdo.
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Ebery speech michelle obama gives is a bomb….and her hair really sucks….isn’t michelle a bit on the chubby side, too?
Last year I asked a classroom full of virulently feminist students what they thought about the fact that news stories about the presidential campaign often described Hilary Clinton’s clothing and hair but not Barack Obama’s (you may argue that he has no hair and he always wears black suits, but you can’t deny his colorful ties). The virulently feminist students just sort of shrugged, so maybe I’m really not onto something here. But isn’t describing the surface of female politicians–their hair, their clothes, their shoes–just another way of minimizing the content of their ideas? And isn’t that part of a larger misogyny? Everyone hates Dick Cheney because he’s evil, but he’s evil based on what he says. People hate Sarah Palin in a more personal way, because she’s pretty and stupid and homey and conservative perhaps, just as people hated Hilary Clinton–before Barack put her somewhere safe–because she didn’t care about pretty, wouldn’t bake cookies, and she’s smart. Working with that range of hatreds–pretty to not pretty, cookies to no cookies, stupid to smart–female politicians really don’t have as much of a chance to be judged on their ideas. Do they?
Last year I asked a classroom full of virulently feminist students what they thought about the fact that news stories about the presidential campaign often described Hilary Clinton’s clothing and hair but not Barack Obama’s (you may argue that he has no hair and he always wears black suits, but you can’t deny his colorful ties). The virulently feminist students just sort of shrugged, so maybe I’m really not onto something here. But isn’t describing the surface of female politicians–their hair, their clothes, their shoes–just another way of minimizing the content of their ideas? And isn’t that part of a larger misogyny? Everyone hates Dick Cheney because he’s evil, but he’s evil based on what he says. People hate Sarah Palin in a more personal way, because she’s pretty and stupid and homey and conservative perhaps, just as people hated Hilary Clinton–before Barack put her somewhere safe–because she didn’t care about pretty, wouldn’t bake cookies, and she’s smart. Working with that range of hatreds–pretty to not pretty, cookies to no cookies, stupid to smart–female politicians really don’t have as much of a chance to be judged on their ideas. Do they?
Um- you want me to comment on Sarah Palin’s ideas? I thought her hair was her idea? Well- that and her creepy racism and sexism and xenophobia- but her deepest and most important idea seemed like her hair. Perhaps I missed something?
In response to another comment. See in context »I guess that’s another way of just sort of shrugging.
In response to another comment. See in context »I like Jeff’s point, but I’d like to add that a Democratic Senator once asked whether he thought Ronald Reagan dyed his hair responded, “No, I think he’s just prematurely orange.”